The character of Jacek Winkler, a Polish oppositionist, who joined Afghan mujahideens to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s, is in Anca Damian's film a mix of Don Quixote and Koziołek Matołek. An artist, a dreamer, traveller, anarchist and romantic – that's who we meet in The Magic Mountain. There is no exaggeration in this view – Winkler was such an extraordinary man that it's hard to believe it's his first film portrait.
During World War II, a large part of his family died. When he looked at dead bodies on the streets of Warsaw as a child, he dreamed of becoming a knight and fighting all of the evil in the world. He never resigned from this dream. During the communism period he was an active member of the opposition, later he went to Paris and from there coordinated actions against the Soviet Union. He was a painter – he organised happenings and marches in collaboration with French homosexuals, and he smuggled underground leaflets. When the USSR attacked Afghanistan in 1979, he decided to go to Kabul and fight the invader with its inhabitants. 'That's what I dreamed of my whole life – to meet people not afraid of the Red Army' – he says in Anca Damian's movie. That is how Jacek Winkler started to fight for Afghanistan and lived as a partisan in the Hindu Kush mountains.
In The Magic Mountain, his story is told as a documentary fairy tale, based around a father's conversation with his daughter. Winkler (who speaks with Jerzy Radziwiłowicz's voice), gives his daughter (Julia Kijowska) a survival lesson. 'Remember the first rule of survival: if you can, don't die'. His advice serves as illustrations for pieces of the story. These are not simple, didactic talks, but subversive stories about life, dreams, following one's inner voice.
Damian's protagonists follow it every time. Even when they have to pay the highest price for their ideals. As the protagonist of The Path to Beyond – the Romanian artist's first Polish film. Then she told the story of Claudio Crulic, a Romanian arrested by Polish police in 2007 and accused of theft. In a jail in Kraków he started a hunger strike and died four months later. In The Magic Mountain Damian also tells the story of a non-obvious moral victory and a man who sacrifices a lot to remain true to himself.